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The other night I had a dream that it was the 90s again and I was trapped in one of my sessions with my then-guitar teacher and he was again forcing me to try and learn how to play “Stairway To Heaven.”

Fucking “Stairway To Heaven.”

I love my guitar. I love playing it, when I play it, which is somewhat more rarer these days. But back then I was full of boundless enthusiasm about learning to play the thing and I was so nervous and so fucking terrible about it. And thus I convinced my mom to pony up the cash to get me a session with some dude with a pony tail at the local guitar shop once a week. This was maybe 1997-ish?

Mind you, all professional guitar teachers have pony tails. It’s like a fucking requirement. Same thing for the schlubby white dudes who work at your local Game Stop. Another Game Stop requirement: That hot Asian/Pacific Islander girl who wears really, really tight pants. After she leaves Game Stop, that girl will go get a job at your local gym and thanks to her, you will never ever ever quit your membership.

Anyway. Six weeks I spent with that dude who wanted me to slave over my guitar until I could play “Stairway To Heaven” in its entirety. “This is a right of passage!” he would scream as my fingers struggled. “But Page just stole this from ‘Taurus’ by Spirit!” I would scream back, but that was irrelevant to my guitar teacher. His name was something unspectacular like… Greg. “All the best mages steal and make the magic of others their own!”

That was a big thing with my guitar teacher: Magic. The occult. The focusing of one’s will onto the world around oneself and interacting and influencing it. Mastering your domain, and achieving a dominion with nature and this goofy playground we call reality. “This song is a magic spell,” he would tell me again and again, “and I want you to get this enchantment right.” It was a big deal to him that I attempt a passable version of Page’s solo. I tried to explain to him that that wasn’t my goal with learning to play the guitar, but it fell on deaf ears…

All I wanted to do was learn how to write songs. I wanted to entertain myself and write little pop ditties. Maybe I’d do something serious with them, but maybe not. They were going to be my own magic, intended for and belonging only to me. Three chords and a melody. That’s what someone had promised me, and with just three chords and a melody I could change my life. I wasn’t interested in learning someone else’s solos or playing them or anything like that, especially not for others’ consumption.

Honestly, If I wanted to masturbate in front of a group of people then I’d yank out my other magic wand and do so, thank you very much.

As my young fingers slaved over the fretboard my guitar teacher wanted to fill my head with stories of the occult powers and apprenticeship of Jimmy Page. He wanted to talk about Kenneth Anger and Lucifer Rising. He wanted to talk to me and get me excited about sigils and secret words. He thought it was important that I knew not just about the words and deeds and actions of Aleister Crowley, the “wickedest man in the world,” but that I knew the influence that he had had on some of my favorite musicians.

Mind you, don’t forget: This was the 90s. Back then we were either obsessed with the 70s or told that we should be obsessed with the 70s. And we should be obsessed with their obsessions. Like Tolkien and The Lord Of The Rings and Thelema and Aleister Fucking Crowely.

If you’re interested in the short version on Crowley, it goes like this: He was a shit. And a piece of shit. And full of shit. And he may have been onto something. I’ve talked about him here previously, if you’re interested, but I’ll say this… If there’s truly magic in this world, outside of a young girl’s heart or in music, then he might’ve made some real strides towards discovering it. I’m not exactly what I’d call a full fledged “magic” enthusiast, but I’ve always had an interest in the strange and eye towards a certain level of experimentation. I’ve done my research and from what I understand, you can do some of Crowley’s rituals and get the same results. But the thing is… so what? Do you really want to summon a demon? Look out your window. They’re already here. They’ve taken over!

(And sure, we know that the Devil is a hardcore patron of the Arts, clearly, but then he went down to Georgia and all I want to know is if I were to meet him on the road… Which of us plays the fiddle better?)

And sadly none of this knowledge that was being dropped on me by this sleazy dude with a pony tail and overpriced guitar lessons was new. Maybe/maybe not in this post I’ll go into an anecdote about my dad, but one of the few things my father ever gave me was an extensive collection of esoteric anecdotal knowledge about the heroes and icons and monsters and cunning folk of classic rock. Invite me to a party with your parents and I’ll be a fucking hit. Wanna hear a story about Keith Moon and horse tranquilizers?

Sure you do. But maybe another time. Anyway. After six weeks in a tiny little closet in the back of the guitar shop I finally got up the balls to tell my guitar teacher that enough was a enough. “Look, Gandalf,” I said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Fuck this. Teach me something else.” His style was to learn songs and go from there, so show the technique and the craft behind individual songs, and expand it. It hurt him greatly to have to give up this little spell, but finally he nodded and acquiesced. The next song he taught me was “Angie” by the Rolling Stones.

Thanks to my guitar teacher I always think of this song as an ode to wanting to get fucked. “This song will release the flood, if you know what I mean,” my guitar teacher would tell me. I’d tell him that I didn’t exactly know what he meant and then he’d start a complicated explanation of how exactly the physical effects of arousal come about in a woman’s vagina. I’d cut him off then and say, “Ah, yes. I get it.”

“This song is all about pussy,” he’d tell me, simplifying it. He was a happily married guy, he’d assure me, but whenever he and his bodies would go out of town, he always took his guitar with him. If he met a nice girl, one who intrigued him, he’d pull out the guitar and play “Angie” for her. And then the flood would come, he lead me to believe. “This song will get you into serious trouble,” he’d tell me. “And that trouble is called ‘girls.'”Again, “this song is all about pussy.” And probably the pussy of David Bowie’s first wife, at least from a historical perspective.

I’m not here to talk to you now about my, ah, cocksmanship, or my luck with the ladies, or any of that. Everyone’s got a set of magic words or that perfect song that you can put on and it gets the kind of attention you want from the people you want amorous attention from. What I’m saying here is that was never what the guitar was supposed to be for me. It was not an extension of my dick. It was not a metaphor for my penis and it wasn’t something that I was hoping would get me into any trouble or any women. I’d like to think I’m beyond any kind of cheap metaphors or mentality about women and penetration.

FYI: I grew up, for the most part, in Sacramento, California. In and around that area is where this story is taking place. The thing about Sacramento is that back then, every guy you’d meet who had a ponytail and was over 40 probably had some story about how he was in Tesla for about five minutes. Other than that, the local music scene consisted of all this bad white funk and swing/rockabilly bullshit. That the guitar teachers would consider themselves citizen warlocks isn’t so much of a stretch, but that their world was some kind of undercover seduction community… Well, I guess that wasn’t much of a stretch either. Sigh.

Anyway. After I had mastered “Angie” to the approval of my guitar teacher, we moved on to “December” by Collective Soul.

Sadly, there was no deep knowledge to be dropped on me that had to do with this song or any kind of belief system behind it. It wasn’t about magic nor was it about impressing girls, not as far as my guitar teacher was concerned. It was just a song that was on the radio at the time and he liked it. As far as my tutelage in the guitarsenal (or the guitarmy) was going, it was busy work. Two weeks later I got a call at home from my guitar teacher’s wife to tell me that they were moving out of state and that he wouldn’t be able to continue my lessons, but a good friend of his would and that the first lesson with him would be free to see if we were a good fit. If I was interested. I remember sitting there in the den of my California home and holding that phone and being silent for a long time. I was thinking, I guess, but mostly I was realizing that I didn’t care one way or another. The guy’s wife asked me I was still there and I was and I told her so and I said sure, and told me that the lesson with the other guy would be at the same time at the same place and I said I’d be there. Physically, at least.

Anyway, the replacement guy was a nice Philipino man who’s real name I can’t remember but he kept wanting me to call him Zen. Everyone called him Zen, he assured me, and I had a problem with that. He had a pony tail too, so I knew he was legit. His alternative credentials was that he had been in a band with Perry Farrell about six or seven years earlier, prior to that band’s implosion and Farrell going on to start Jane’s Addiction. I said, “Wow. That’s interesting.” I remember he smiled so big at that. “You love that, don’t you?” he asked. “All you kids love that, that I knew Perry Farrell.” I shrugged. I didn’t really like Perry Farrell. Or Jane’s Addiction. Maybe a song or two. I liked one or two songs by Porno For Pyros. And Dave Navarro looked like a parody of an alternative rock God masquerading as a magician in drag to me.

After that first lesson with the man whom I will sadly now and only now refer to Zen, I went where he instructed would be an abundance of the one album he recorded with that band that included Perry Farrell: Tower Records. Never found it, sadly. Of course not. Maybe it had never actually be conjured in existence. Maybe he had made it all up, which wouldn’t surprise me. That’s the thing about magic, kids: What you want doesn’t exist. It’s bullshit. But if you wrap it in a story and think about it hard enough and tell it right, you can make it real.

That’s the idea, anyway.

Back in the 90s, there was this concept of division in music as well. It’s a cyclical idea, part of our constant search for authenticity and what’s real and our witch hunt for anything that’s untrue. We disliked poseurs back then, I remember. Suddenly we all become Holden Caufield, righteously screaming on into the dying of the light about all those phony people that surrounded us.

That guy that I’ll call Zen here really hated rap and hip hop. He assumed by by my picking up the guitar that I must hate it too. He and I would talk about how Rock vs. Rap was really the battle for the soul of the humanity, or something like that. Just a year or two later, a bunch of assholes would be creating something called “Rap Rock” and it would probably blow his mind. Nevermind that a decade earlier Run DMC and Aerosmith had already shown us that we could all “walk this way.” It was really about taste, what you liked and what you disliked. It wasn’t about the Rockers vs. the Mods, not anymore. Or jazz and rock n’ roll (and the effects both have had on American crime). Some songs are about unification and partying and some are about solitude and otherness. They can be about one or the other and usually they tie into each other. It always comes back to us vs. them, and it’s usually the same. Do you even know what side you’re on?

Me, personally? I’m on the side that’s got the butter on it.

All I’m saying here is that in some loose definition, all music (and possibly all noise, depending on the listener) is pop, and it doesn’t matter whose side you’re on when you’re marching into the Holy Land to wage your stake in the Crusades, you’ll probably be singing a little song to keep yourself occupied and though the lyrics may change, the melody is probably the same as your enemies’ song. Like what you like and don’t like what you don’t like, because your music belongs to you and only you, but just know that sometimes only the concept of division is what divides and what you like and what you don’t like probably share the same address.

Anyway, that guy Zen and I used to talk about that kind of stuff at the guitar lessons my mom was paying for and, well, they weren’t very deep conversations. Thankfully the lessons weren’t that expensive either.

I’m thinking about this stuff now, but the last I really thought about this all was back in late 1999, or early 2000, a few years after my adventures with the guitar teachers (that was the mid-90s, and I was in high school then). I was homeless, just having turned 18, and I was very much alive in this world and very much adrift. I was living with a mess of a friend, a real asshole (but in our group of friends back then he was our asshole, as Commander Light had so perfectly put it not too long ago). It was late at night one night and we were sitting on a porch, this friend and I, and this hideous girl who he was fucking behind the back of another friend of his. She was a disgusting mess and there was a guitar present. I picked it up, so tuned out of whatever their conversation was about, and I was just finger picking, just finding a tune, something to keep my mind active. At some point I just remember my friend getting so upset with me and grabbing the guitar out of my heads and yelling at me, “That’s not how you play ‘Dazed And Confused’!” and then he proceeded to try to play the Led Zeppelin song for the amusement of his lady friend.

He played it terribly but she was easily amused. Eventually they left me the guitar while they snuck off into the night to fuck somewhere and I just stared out into the dark. I hadn’t been trying to play “Dazed And Confused.” I don’t even know how to play “Dazed And Confused,” nor have I ever cared to learn it. But I certainly felt dazed and confused. And there on that porch in the darkness I played “Stairway To Heaven” all the way through, just as my guitar teacher had taught me and forced me to practice all those years earlier.

That was the only time I’ve played it since I quit the guitar lessons and I haven’t played it since. I don’t even remember how now.

But that was then and this is now and 2500 words later I can tell you that I still have the same guitar I had back then and I still play it occasionally but not like I did back then, sadly. But I still play it for the same reasons I sought it out back then: for myself. For enjoyment. Hell, I don’t even masturbate solely for enjoyment anymore these days (I do it so that I don’t go crazy and kill people).

Magic is just another one of those things, like religion and politics and fresh fruit and an interest in other human beings. You believe in it, but in your way, and it’s not comparable to what or how someone else thinks or how they feel it. When people ask you that stupid question, “What would you choose if you had to pick from one, to be either blind or deaf?” and I think I’d have to ultimately choose to be blind. There’s so much in this life that I think I’m seeing but really not anyway, and plus, as cheesy as it sounds, I think I’d die without music.

In that regard, and in others, I haven’t given up on magic, but magic the way I feel it and understand it and appreciate it and practice it. These aren’t just words and a silly story you’re being told here. This is my incantation and this website is my talisman and hypersigil. And my grimoire. And if you’ve ever written on this website, or read this website, or even just these words right now, well, then you’re a part of my coven. Welcome to the game that’s disguised as everything. We’re telling a story that’s big and crazy and a little bit odd and hopefully a little bit fun and if we want it hard it enough and tell it right then maybe we can make it real. And if you’re lucky it’ll have a good tune that you could dance to.

In a zoo in the Czech Republic, two lions killed a white tigress; five white tigers in a Chinese zoo had become fearful of the live chickens offered them as food; and in China’s Hubei province, a gang of macaques trained in kung-fu turned on their human master. Male Campbell’s monkeys, in combining and altering their six basic alert calls (boom, hok, krak, krak-oo, kok-oo, and wak-oo), were deemed to exhibit sophisticated proto-syntax. Rhino poaching was on the rise, though Nepal’s greater one-horned rhinos were flourishing because they are protected by guards on elephantback. Wasps were observed to kidnap ladybugs for use as incubators for their eggs, and the ladybugs were observed ultimately to be unharmed by the experience. Male bedbugs were found to emit an anti-predator pheromone to discourage other males from mounting them; males with blocked pheromone glands are mounted for longer than are other males and suffer more grievous abdominal stab wounds from the mounters’ penises. Boys who were exposed in the womb to phthalates—chemicals widely found in cosmetics, vinyl upholstery, and sex toys—are less likely to play rough. Studies of birds and mammals showed that males have more consistent personalities.

The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, in which 57 percent of all families of living things died due to global warming, was found to have caused many animals to flee to Antarctica. A subspecies of European blackcap birds was noted to have evolved rounder wings and longer, more slender beaks in response to feeding by humans; evolutionary biologists doubted, however, that the birds would ever become a distinct species, because are too fickle for animals to depend on in the longer term. Engineers tested a RoboClam off Cape Cod. Scientists described 158 species of venomous catfish and postulated that as many as 1,600 species of catfish may be venomous. Researched discovered four new species of king crab, concluded that female leatherback turtles are right-flippered, and revealed that the pitch of blue whales’ songs was getting lower. Scientists discovered how to induce molting in blue crabs, thereby rendering them soft-shelled on demand. Behavioral ecologists frightened baby red-eyed tree frogs into hatching early by pretending to be snakes. Pharmacology researchers found that mice who consume hot peppers with their cocaine are more likely to die. Gerbils in Israel are more cautious than those in Jordan. People tend to believe that God believes what they believe. California has too many Chihuahuas.

The passages above are from the “Findings” sectionof the February 2010 issue of Harper’s and were written by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi.

Some thoughts the song “Spill The Wine” by Eric Burdon and War, featured on the album Eric Burdon Declares “War,” which came out the same year as their other collaborative album, The Black-Man’s Burdon.

When I was a kid, this song only seemed to come on when I was deep in the throes of night, or sleep, or perhaps madness.

This is widely believed to be about, or at least heavily influenced by drugs. According to Brown, this song celebrates women: “All ladies are beautiful. You’ve got to look at them. God, I believe, put all of us here and made us all different so we could be like the flowers, you know. Like women. I look at them as beautiful flowers. Even when they get older, the flowers and so on, and that’s what it really boils down to, they can be skinny, big, fat, I’ve seen some fine voluptuous women. And then I’ve seen some that are skinny, and if you look at them, they could be beautiful, depending on personality and stuff.”

The lady speaking Spanish in the background was Eric Burdon’s girlfriend. Says Brown: “We went back there and we put up a little tent, candlelight, and some wine back there. They were behind there, and Eric was doing things to her and making her talk.”

This was used in the movie Boogie Nights as part of a pool party scene with the porn stars.

The Isley Brothers covered this in 1971 on their album Givin’ It All Back.

And that sounds a little something like this:

As a kid, I had the radio on a lot. This was when the radio was better, mind you, and I kept it around like a secret lover or some kind of invisible friend. I’d cheat on it a lot with CDs and tapes and vinyl, a lot, but many a night I spent seized in a radio daze, or I’d listen to it while getting ready for school or for work or a dance or a date or something.

One of the many species classified under the larger phylum “alternarock.”

For most of high school it was the “alternative rock” station for me, but I did flirt a year there with the “alternative rock” station that was slightly harder, which basically meant that I had to put up with a lot of bullshit like “mandatory Metallica” and following up a band like Kittie or Jane’s Addiction with AC/DC. How sad is it that I can’t remember the good songs I got in return from that station? I just remember they played “Bound For The Floor” a lot.

Rewinding the tape back to somewhere in my much younger years when I was a stupid little shit who’d read, daydream, ponder, fascinate, and shit along with the radio, you should probably know I kept floating back and forth between classic rock and Motown. Those were my bag back then.

Hence all of my old school music knowledge/anecdotes being about things like Keith Moon’s addiction to horse tranquilizers or waxing nostalgic about Berry Gordy’s sex habits.

The Who’s “Who Are You?” was about Keith’s tendency to pass on street corners during drug binges only to be discovered by police the next day who assumed he was dead.

Anyway. I remember the Animals’ “House Of The Rising Sun” and I knew War’s “Cisco Kid” and “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” The radio loved those songs. And then I heard this song one night, “Spill The Wine,” and it was late at night as my father were driving around, lost in the Hollywood hills, high above the world. It was a mash up by two artists I liked before I knew what a mash up. I was tired, my eyes were heavy, and this song started dictating images to me as I looked down at the world, and I would get lost in the idylls of walking through the set of a Hollywood movie that was packed with mountain kings and a harem of women and wine spilt all about. And I was easily swept away in the mystical and engimatic nature of the song, which everyone assumes the song refers to drugs, which it does in a way, but you have to remember that the prizely grown native drug of California will always be sex, and the song enthusiastically endorses going after that pearl as many times as you can get it. If I had actually known what a clitoris was back when I was a kid, well…

“I’ll take the coral reefs as my metaphor. Though hardly so beautiful. If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory….”

-a quote from Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, a movie that I was watching the other day and just first stirred the pot on several thoughts I had locked up. Thoughts about human beings and boxes we live in.

Warren Ellis had created a comic book character years ago called Jack Hawksmoor, the “king of cities.” Jack was a normal human who had been abducted by city-empathic aliens from the future and repeatedly operated on and “upgraded” to have city-specific powers for use with fighting some unknown future threat that was coming.

Jack Hawksmoor, the King Of Cities.

Hawksmoor, who’s name was inspired by both Spring Heeled Jack and Nicholas Hawksmoor, couldn’t survive for very long outside of an urban environment, but when he was in any city, he had powers specific to that city, including things like superhuman strength and agility, but also psychometry and the ability to control and alter architecture and infrastructure. I don’t think the character was ever utlized by successive writers to his full potential, but I do remember in one story where Hawksmoor had to fight a powerful villain, he made sure that the fight took place in Mexico City, the larged city in the world, to maximize his abilities.

The other day someone came up to me and asked about the continuing fire situation in the southern California area. “It looks like the end of the world,” they told me and were then shocked when I wasn’t shocked by that statement. They asked me if it was still going on, if the fires were still burning, and they asked this as if I knew the answer. Being primarily a still a Californian deep down in my weird little DNA, I’ll constantly let people know where I’m from (in case it’s not obviously and readily apparent why I’m better than them on a variety of levels), but it’s a double edged sword in that I’m expected to have an answer everytime some new weird or stupid piece of news comes out of the Golden State.

So, my answer to this question about the fires was simply: “I don’t know.” Then the question came: You know a lot of people there, right? Wouldn’t they know from the constant smoke in the distance? Me: “If you live in LA, or spend signifigant time there, I think you make a kind of peace with a lot of things there being perpetually fucked up. The air, especially.” This answer only prompted confusion.

So I attempted a clarification: “Listen, here’s the thing about how people in California operate: Unless your house is on fire, or you’re personally bein evacuated, or it’s fucking up some sex you’re trying to get or, I don’t know, your pot delivery, or something, you don’t really care about a whole lot of other people’s tragedy.”

Anyway, after the question and answer exchange about my home land, I came back to my lair, the whole exchange floating around in the back of my head, and I put on my music player, hit random, and the first song given to me was Death Cab For Cutie‘s “Grapevine Fires,” from their nice enough last album, Narrow Stairs.

The video for the song, see above, directed by the Walter Robot duo, is a lovely affair, very nice and effective, but as with so many music videos, it doesn’t follow the lyrical narrative of the song, which is especially a shame here, I think. Particularly since, for me, one of Ben Gibbard’s strengths isn’t just the sonic aspect of his songwriting, the chords he chooses or how well he plays them, but just the way he manages to capture a tone to flow through his short stories.

The songwriter and his brand new bride.

And “Grapevine Fires” is one of the most lovely, most melancholy short stories I think he’s ever released, a beautiful song, drenched in a harmony fit for a funeral, a juxtaposition of the beautiful and the tragic as a man, a woman, the woman’s daughter, all go for a picnic in a cemetery in the Los Angeles area to watch the fires in the distance. There’s wine and some paper cups for the couple, who may have already been evacuated, as they watch the desolation unfolding and the young girl, not aware of the seriousness, or perhaps despite it, just dances around. “The northern sky looks like the end of days” as the man watches her and realizes that, no matter what, everything’s gonna be just fine. Even when it isn’t. Maybe it’ll rain, maybe it won’t. Either way, it’s only a matter of time. And you’re alive today.

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